This webcast focuses on designing accountability and assessment systems for managing continuous improvement. Over the past 20 years, state educational agencies, schools, community and technical colleges have faced major increases in federal and state accountability requirements. There are growing expectations that these organizations will not just report annual performance, but shall use federal and state resources to continually improve performance. Perkins III has been a major driving force in creating this new accountability environment and is shaping the development of state and local systems. The next challenge is how to build from these efforts to develop a new generation of performance accountability capable of managing continuous improvement. This presentation will focus on the major design principles and key features of next generation performance accountability systems for managing this continuous improvement and, also, share with us how these can be used to build on current Perkins III efforts. The design principles are based on the leading public and private models, including Baldrige, Six Sigma, and Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard. The presentation will first describe the new accountability environment for career and technical education and how this environment is likely to change over the coming years. It will then review leading public and private models and practices in performance management and their implications for career and technical education. It will also discuss the need to improve school and college assessment systems. And, finally, the presentation will summarize and discuss the major design principles of next generation systems and how states, schools, and colleges can apply them in improving their capacity to manage continuous improvement.